Leaders set the direction for the people and the organizations they lead, integrating new-style management skills with traditional demands. Assess and build on your leadership qualities, and master the art of running a team and optimizing individual performance to get collective success.
Managing and leading
The pressures on managers are changing dramatically. Managers today are expected to have mastered all the traditional techniques of management - of implementation, maintenance, and watching the bottom line - but also to have mastered the new-style management skills that make them leaders, people who think for themselves.
Management Techniques
Old-style management skills
Planning
Organizing
Implementing
Measuring
New-style management skills
Counselling groups
Providing resources
Encouraging ideas
Thinking for yourself
Using all the skills
* Mastery of all the old style management skills was crucial to Jack Welch in bringing dramatic chance to GE.
* Planned: "Be Number 1 or 2 in your global market or else" is strategic planning at its best - short, sharp and to the point.
* Organized: Welch restructured GE into a dozen businesses with no supervisory layer between him and the business leaders.
* Implemented: Welch put his "big, big ideas", such as Work Out and Six Sigma, into operation within months.
* Measured: Welch put measures on everything by which he wanted to judge performance.
However, the new-style techniques he now restlessly encourages in his managers are indispensable in a fast-moving business world and are far better suited to developing the full strengths of an organization.
Personal attributes
New-style ideals, like old-style managing, are only as valuable as the energy with which you pursue them. Welch is a superlative example of how greatly leadership revolves around personal attributes. Excellent ideas, of course, are indispensable, but you will not translate them into excellent action without the qualities that Welch admires in leaders. Test your own attributes. Do you have:
* Enormous energy and passion for the job?
* An ability to excite, energize, and mobilize an organization?
* The understanding that the customer is the arbiter of performance and the source of profit?
* Technical grasp backed by strong financial understanding?
* A desire to achieve better profits through better products, services, and processes?
Developing your leadership skills
If you do not possess all of the above attributes, do not despair. Some people are natural born leaders, but you can develop any of the live attributes if you have the desire to lead and are willing to work at it.
Write down what you really like about your job. Think up a project that uses these features and try to bring it to life.
Develop Your Leadership Abilities
Put together a "hot group" to execute the project. Set demanding deadlines, with the group's agreement, and delegate tasks to members, with clear responsibilities.
Make sure that the project will generate real benefits for customers (internally or externally) and will pay off handsomely.
Ensure that you know as much as anybody, if not more, about the technical and financial aspects of the project.
Plan for its further development to generate still better results.
It is true that you risk failure when you take an initiative like this. But you cannot become an effective leader unless you are prepared sometimes to fail on the way to overall success.
